Ethos, If Humor
by katreenarox
Summary: A collaborative work speculating on Jack and Rose's first encounters. Co-written by Edith Wharton. Originally written and posted as an April Fool's joke. Completed.
1. Chapter 1

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with pale blue eyes, who, on the other side of Washington's statue, appeared to be dissembling himself in front of the statue pedestal's text. Rosemary's eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Jack Brannigan was to be at Federal Hall, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to herself for the afternoon; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts of her employers. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more favorably than it had begun.

She began to gravitate toward some Japanese tourists, tranquilly studying her prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite so engrossed in a faded engraving! She guessed that he was too shy to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part. It amused her to think that any one as handsome as Mr. Jack Brannigan should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the tourists had caught sight of her and determined that she would be most likely to humor their query. Then, as she offered her erroneous answer to the question of which building it was that King Kong was climbing in the movie, she slowly led the crowd within meters of her target. As Jack approached mouthing an objection, the circle of tourists pressed Rosemary towards him, and he was aware of a slender hand brushing the back of his arm. He stopped dead in his tracks, his ingenuous face looking as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the roots of his platinum blond hair seemed to redden. The circle surged again, almost flinging Rosemary into his arms.

She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was enveloped in the scent of her jacket, and his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch.

"I'm so sorry; were you saying something?"

She held out her hand as the circle finally managed to accommodate him, and they stood exchanging a few words amid the crowd. Yes-—he just said it was the Empire State Building. The Chrysler building was in Godzilla-he blushed again as he asserted himself. Godzilla? Couldn't be!

But at this point one or two tourists tried to interrupt the conversation with questions about the buildings' location, and Rosemary had to intensify the argument.

"The Chrysler Building's Art Deco crown best represents the industrialized human civilization that's contrasted with King Kong throughout the movie," she said over the tourists; and Jack, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded in articulating that while he did not know anything about Art Deco, he was quite certain that Kong had climbed the Empire State.

"Ah—well the tourists just got tired of us, so perhaps we can go to the Skyscraper Museum to settle this."

She gestured to the vacated space around them, and in a moment, with the ease that seemed to attend the fulfillment of all her wishes, they had set off for Battery Park City, and she was lecturing him on the finer points of Manhattan architecture.

As they passed each skyscraper he watched her in silent fascination while her hands flitted above their heads, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the boxy buildings' towering bulk. It seemed wonderful to him that anyone should perform with such careless ease the difficult task of playing Lower Manhattan tour guide while maintaining a coherent argument. He would never have dared to explore downtown himself, lest he should find himself exposed to novel experiences well outside his comfort zone; but, secure in the shelter of her guidance, he gazed up at the otherwise nondescript skyscrapers with a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Rosemary, with the iconic skyline of midtown Manhattan on her mind, had no great fancy to group it with the current cookie-cutter towers which seemed such marvels to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of the charms of architecture is the fact of observing it together, she proceeded to give the last touch to Jack's enjoyment by smiling at him across her lifted hand.

"Do you get it now-why King Kong had to have climbed the Chrysler Building?" she asked solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never been more convinced otherwise.

"At least you're consistent," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by the thought that Jack, who might have sounded the depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to manage him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade. But Rosemary's methods were more delicate. She remembered that her preliminary notetaking had defined Jack as the young man who would promise his commanding officer never to go out in the rain without first completing the simulation for it; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a gently rehearsed air to the scene, in the hope that her companion, instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a companion to schedule more mundane activities into the predictable routine of his life.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the museum was found to be closed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Jack's limitations once they parted ways.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time they reunited in the hallways of Fort Hamilton, Rosemary had her conclusion. It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would never learn to distinguish between Art Deco and cookie-cutter towers. There was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion. She had refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a settled look of dullness began to creep over his candid features, she saw that extreme measures were necessary.

"And how," she said, leaning forward, "are you getting on with your classic action films?"

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skillful operator.

"I've got a few new things," he said, suffused with pleasure, but lowering his voice as though he feared his coworkers might be in league to despoil him.

She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn on to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could assert a superiority that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of his acquaintances cared for classic action films, or knew anything about them; and the consciousness of this ignorance threw Jack's knowledge into agreeable relief. The only difficulty was to introduce the topic and to keep it to the front; most people showed no desire to have their ignorance dispelled, and Jack was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

But Miss Rosemary, it appeared, really did want to know about classic action films; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to make the task of further instruction as easy as it was agreeable. She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and, prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over his listeners' faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze. The "points" she had had the presence of mind to glean from a friend, in anticipation of this very contingency, were serving her to such good purpose that she began to think her visit to said friend had been the luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.

Jack's sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable. He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Rosemary's personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.

Jack's interest in classic action films had not originated with himself: it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his own. Although Rosemary was unclear on the details, she could easily infer that his predilection had been inculcated through mindless and endless childhood viewings, yet the man took as much pride in his conditioned preferences as though they had been his own work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard them as such, and to feel a sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any reference to a classic action film that he was certain only he had truly appreciated.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Rosemary was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic, or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly guessed that Jack's egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring constant nurture from without. Rosemary had the gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Jack Brannigan's future as combined with her own. He was from Fort Hood, and but lately introduced to Brooklyn, where he had been transferred, after the initial round of Force XXI trials, to pursue advanced Battle Command Brigade and Below training at Fort Hamilton. Every form of prudence and suspicion had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious, with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for his commanding officer to extract his promise about the rainy day simulation, so little likely was he to hazard himself abroad without permission. After attaining his Phase 1 FBCB2 certification, and coming to the attention of his superiors for outstanding performance, the young man continued to live in the barracks at Fort Hood; but after the Shadow Moses Incident, when most of the Force XXI troops had been killed or discharged, none other than Colonel Campbell himself thought that what he called Jack's "interests" demanded the latter's presence in New York. Campbell accordingly installed himself at the Fort Hamilton base, and Jack, whose sense of duty was not inferior to his commanding officer's, spent all his weekdays on the base's VR Training Modules where a batch of digital men on a vast A.I. network had grown sophisticated in the management of Jack's combat abilities, and where he was further educated with becoming reverence about every detail of the art of digitized warfare.

As far as Rosemary could learn, this had hitherto been Jack's only occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all fear of losing her job, and of the difficulties on which that fear was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.


	3. Chapter 3

The movie reruns lasted till the small hours; and when Rosemary went to bed that morning she had stayed up too long for her own good.

The mere thought of her supervisor, who could take a man up and toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a possible factor in her plans, filled Rosemary with envy. She had been bored all yesterday by Jack—the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honor of boring her for life.

It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she? To be a honeypot, or bodybag stuffing. As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and dossiers lying unread on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Nastasha Romanenko's Los Angeles apartment, with its bugged walls and permanent installment of DIA operatives. No; she was not made for an ignominious retreat into unguaranteed safety, for the squalid compromises of life on the U.S. government's wanted list. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of proactivity; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the proactivity of others was not what she wanted. A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of conspiracy without caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself an unwitting pawn in the schemes which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even moments when she was conscious of not knowing her puppeteers' most direct orders.

For a long time she had refused to play honeypot. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her associates; she had seen their charming eyes change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement to anxiety, as they passed under the spell of the terrible god of chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her own case.

For in the last year she had found that her superiors expected her to take a place in the bedsheets of their targets. It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the data and influence which occasionally replenished her conspiratorial imagination. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown on her. Once or twice of late she had obtained a great deal of leverage, and instead of keeping it against future losses, had spent it on petty favors; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Patriot set, if one played at all one must either play high or be set down as cowardly and dispensible; but she knew that the scheming passion was upon her, and that in her present surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Rosemary; but then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

She began to undress without ringing up Jack, whom she had sent home. She had been long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her Jack were in the same position, except that the latter received his orders more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little streaks at the roots of her hair, faint flaws in the smooth coverage of her dye job.

"Oh, I must stop worrying!" she exclaimed. "Unless it's the electric light—" she reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two streaks at her hairline remained.

Rosemary stood and undressed in haste.

"It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She returned wearily to the thought of Jack, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost sure she had "landed" him: a few days' work and she would win her reward. But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a temporary rest from worry, no more—-and how little that would mean to her now! Her ambitions had grown large enough to collapse under their own weight in failure. And what if she failed? Would it be her own fault or that of destiny?

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their entire means of living, used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But you'll get it all back-—you'll get it all back, with your face." … The remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.


End file.
